As technology progresses in the digital age, there has been the continued challenge to serve the growing and changing information needs of society. Technology has constantly reinvented new ways of utilizing data by optimizing the space and time necessary for the storage, transfer, compilation, and arrangement of information. Methods of data delivery have included the compression and/or ciphering of data sent via floppy diskette, compact disc (CD-ROM), or e-mail and by receiving data from centralized sources such as the Internet, Bulletin Board System (BBS), or other on-line services.
A variety of recent advances in data delivery methods are known such as: metering the on-site usage of licensed software on fixed media; remote installation of software upgrades; and data on-demand services which offer novel ways for optimizing customized data distribution to subscribers. The common focus of these methods is splitting and recombining information in order to achieve more progressive solutions for data delivery. However, due to subscription data size and limited end user technology to support such information, the commercial data vendor in an effort to manage profit and control achieves delivery by maintaining an on-line centralized database where the subscriber uses a centralized information delivery program to download information from and have conditional access to.
Such centralized information delivery programs rely on a fairly extensive library of known desired data. As a result, new data with references not listed in the original library files are unknown to the subscriber. Thus, the reference libraries require frequent updates to remain current with the new data. If the information provider is lax in providing updates, or the subscriber is lax in obtaining and employing available updates, the centralized information delivery program may become obsolete within only a few months after installation. Furthermore, the centralization of information oftentimes results in placing greater demands on data search engines. For example, when querying from a centralized data source, substantially all of the data is searched by the search engine in order to perform retrievals. Such an exhaustive search may result in a longer period of time for the search engine to complete its task.
On-line databases, since their inception, have been the most desirable way to access information from large bodies of data. This was especially the case in the early 1980's when off-line desktop storage was at a premium and data transmission speed was slow. Lobby power helped influence the defining of boundaries between the government's mission of information dissemination and issues of competition with the private sector. The Reagan administration issued a proposal to prevent government agencies from providing on-line access, restricting the federal role of government to that of a wholesaler. Monopolies were forged with select commercial data vendors in the private sector to provide access to public information. Few could afford the expense of buying data up-front for the luxury and privacy of having unlimited searching and retrieval of this information off-line. As a result, searching and retrieval have been limited to either strictly on-line systems or strictly off-line systems. The introduction of CD-ROM, has allowed providers to distribute discs that contain summaries or abstracts of the full document, and reach a larger market at a better price. Although files with frequent updates are not best suited CD-ROM, this advance helped the subscriber search off-line and decide what documents were to be ordered. Compact discs have marked a clear beginning for a hybrid search and retrieval system to evolve and bring both together.
Such is the case in the area of patents. In exchange for disclosure of an invention, the issuance of a U.S. patent is a twenty year grant from the time filed by the government of a property right to the inventor to `exclude others from making, using, or selling the invention`, with the patentee losing rights to the invention upon expiration. Title 37 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Section 1.362(d) provides that maintenance fees may be paid without surcharge for the six-month period beginning three, seven, and eleven years after the date of issue of patents based on applications filed on or after Dec. 12, 1980. An additional six-month grace period is provided by 35 U.S.C. 41(b) and 37 CFR 1.362(e) for payment of the maintenance fee with the surcharge set forth in 37 CFR 1.20(h), as amended effective Dec. 16, 1991. If the maintenance fee is not paid in the patent requiring such payment the patent will expire on the fourth, eighth, or twelfth anniversary of the grant. Eleven years since the first premature patent expiration in December 1985, over 275,000 patents have prematurely expired and entered the public domain with an additional 1,000 patents prematurely expiring each week.
The most common use of patent information and an early step in assessing the patentability of an invention is to perform prior art searches of existing patents. To assist patent examiners, the Automated Patent System (APS) was implemented in April of 1984 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) with over 400 million dollars of taxpayer money to provide sophisticated centralized on-line search capabilities. By accessing the APS database from a computer, an examiner can select patents for review based on the occurrence of specified words or phases, in particular combinations, in the document. The U.S. Congress has long recognized the importance of information dissemination to the PTO's mission. The PTO enabling legislation has several sections addressing information dissemination; the most relevant of these being the requirement that the PTO provide the public with direct access to its search systems. Consequently, the APS database has been available to the public in the PTO Public Search Room since 1990 and, initially on an experimental basis, in 14 of the 74 Patent and Trademark Depository Libraries since 1992.
Virtually all information concerning the content of U.S. patents offered by commercial data vendors is based on data furnished by the PTO. At present, the most prevalent mode of transferring data to the vendor community from the PTO is in the form of files on magnetic tape. For example, the PTO offers copies of the tapes that contain the text used as input in the building of the APS database. The premature expiration of a patent has never been a search requirement for the patent examiner. As a result, there has been no need for the PTO to incorporate this new reference information into the APS database. Currently, the APS database is the representation of the original library files of patent text data at the time of issuance and does not provide a data field for the premature expiration status of a patent. Even though this is the primary source of data provided for sale by the PTO, commercial data vendors in turn have not recognized the potentially unrealized value of premature expiration information.
It is the government's responsibility to publish what the public can not make, use, or sell. Aside from disclosure of the full patent document, the government also publishes the front page information of the patent document in the Official Gazette. The following is from Chapter 2575 of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) Sixth Edition, Revision 1, September 1995.
A notice will appear in each issue of the Official Gazette which will indicate which patents have been granted 3, 7, and 11 years earlier, that the window period has opened, and that maintenance fee payments will now be accepted for those patents. Another Official Gazette notice published after expiration of the grace period will indicate any patent which has prematurely expired due to nonpayment of maintenance fees and any patents which have been reinstated. An annual compilation of such expirations and reinstatements will also be published.
This passage denotes the intention of the government to publish what the public can make, use, or sell. All patents prior to December 1985, expire seventeen years after being granted. For example, if it is the first week of the year 1996 and the public wanted to read what patents had just expired, one would look at the Official Gazette from the first week of 1979. Essentially a book published exactly seventeen years ago would be retrieved. For the first 195 years of the U.S. Patent System, there was no need to republish or compile expired patent information because it was previously published by default.
On Dec. 10, 1985, nearly 200 years since the first patent issued, the Official Gazette (OG) Notice had listed Pat. No. 4,291,808 to become the first patent ever to prematurely expire for failure to pay maintenance fees. Since then, the PTO has published weekly in the OG notices the patent numbers of the expiring patents. The release of the patent numbers only, limits the public to a manual, exhaustive, and inefficient cross-referenced retrieval of the newest patent documents that have prematurely expired, thereby creating for the first time a new need to compile this information. In 1990, the PTO released a series of CD-ROM subscription products including the Classification and Search Support Information System Bibliographic disc (CASSIS-BIB). This disc offers the search and retrieval of title-only patent information dating back to 1969. The subscriber can search for the status of a patent (withdrawn, reinstated, abandoned, or prematurely expired) and view the most current list of premature expired patents. Although the release of the CASSIS-BIB disc can help with the search of patent expirations and allows the subscriber the privacy and cost benefits of such a system, searching is limited to patent titles only, the disc is updated every two months and is not cost effective to update more frequently.
Because of significant changes in technology, revisions to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-130, and the passage of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (Public Law 104-13), public access has further expanded through a variety of programs administered by the PTO's Office of Information Dissemination to include the access of patent and trademark information made available via the Internet and PTO Bulletin Board System (PTO-BBS). Upon browsing Internet sites, patent servers at the Center for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR), Community of Science, Chemical Abstracts Society (CAS), and IBM to name a few, have all neglected to allow searching for the expiration status of a patent. The IBM Patent Server has come closest to this accomplishment where on Jun. 4, 1997, a maintenance status field was integrated into the database which lists the status of a patent upon retrieval only, and is not yet a searchable field.
In November of 1994 the PTO established an on-line BBS. The PTO began to list exclusive files of premature expired patent numbers weekly and list master files of premature expired patent numbers every two months. The patent numbers are published in natural ascending order, and for more than ten years have been keyed in manually by the PTO. As a result, it is not uncommon to see occasional errors like the reversal of digits within the patent number based on an operator's manual entry. In 1995, the PTO added the release of the OG Notices on-line. In the OG Notice on Feb. 6, 1996, the PTO published the premature expired patent numbers for the week of Feb. 13, 1996 instead of the current week. On Mar. 12, 1996 the OG corrected the omission while the PTO-BBS did not. Since then, the exclusive files have been reported one week ahead of the OG Notices upon issue. The master list of premature expired patent numbers released on the PTO-BBS for Dec. 31, 1996 omitted about 6,000 premature expired patent numbers. This omission represents the eight and twelve year expirations since the previous master list on Oct. 31, 1996. This omission is in turn reflected in the December 1996 issue of the CASSIS-BIB CD-ROM. There were further omissions in the February 1997 issue and the CASSIS-BIB subscription disc does not remain corrected to this date. In May 1997, the PTO-BBS shut down due to a diminished user base and the increasing popularity of the Internet. The above inconsistencies indicate that there is no system for detecting error or omission that may be subject to manual labor or clerical errors. The issuance of the premature expired patent numbers by the PTO has now become questionable in regard to method, policy, and accuracy of its use.
The conditions of centralization first mentioned have allowed for industry to overlook novel solutions for the dissemination of newly available information. Accordingly, in light of the above, there is a strong need in the art for a novel system and method for updating information/reference files of a computer and/or computer system without putting the onus of updating on the subscriber so that an information program stored thereon is kept current. Moreover, there is a strong need to improve a system and method to optimize the search, retrieval, reporting, delivery, and update of master database information and newly available information for both on-line and off-line systems.